Born in Ukraine, Slinko is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in the US. While her practice is informed by scholarship on labour, agency, and politics, her inspiration comes from interactions with ordinary people, localised contexts, and material culture. With a sharp eye for the personal and the anecdotal, Slinko often zooms in on the micro within the macro of larger historical and political narratives, offering specific insights into the workings of power and its effects on individuals and society.
Slinko’s practice encompasses a wide range of media, including political satire, drawing, moving image, performance, printmaking, and graphic design. Drawing from her experiences growing up in East Ukraine’s Donbas during the final years of the Soviet Union, Slinko’s perspective is a specific blend of personal history and scholarly insight. Slinko sees her practice as an ongoing fieldwork, where she observes and reflects on the broader forces that shape our daily lives. Keenly aware of the disillusionment, and dispossession that mark her own lived experience of history, Slinko puts the spotlight on resilience, hope, and humour to give graspable forms to personal agency.
Visit Slinko’s website here
February 2025, participating on Dwell Here Research Intensive from 05 – 11 February 2025
At the center of Slinko’s current artistic research is Donbas—a war frontline and her homeland. Moving through the subterranean deposits of anthracite and the toxic residues of the mining industry, she draws connections between ancestral sites and the cells of soil microbes and plants. At the intersection of bare life and material contamination, Slinko explores the correlation between the remediation of land and the redemption of its future narratives. Viewing Donbas through the lenses of historical memory, extraction, and warfare, she seeks to imagine its future reconstruction on a microscopic scale—through plant life and phytoremediation.
Dwell Here offers participants a simple proposition: to commit to this time and place while thinking deeply about its urgencies. Together we are curious to learn what can be activated or challenged through the process of dwelling. IMMA encourages reflection across the following themes to consider geographical, historical, political and cultural concepts of Ireland as a starting point to expand and connect international contexts through similarities and differences:
Technologies of Peace – to consider commemorative landscapes and memories of peace (as a dream, movement, or value) while generating perspectives on sustainable coexistence.
The Irish Paradigm – Welcomes artistic research that creates intimacy and connections, while celebrating the perceived agility and freedoms of operating on the periphery. As a small island on the edge of Europe, Ireland often has a challenging relationship with ‘the centre’.
The Museum as a Site of Vibration – consider how the museum and site can create new vibrations and rhythms within the built legacy of empire. How can museums make visible cultural shifts, including erased, censored or marginalised histories, as well as sustainability, planetary care, sharing and hospitality.